Kate MacKenzie does a nice job of putting all of the arguments together in one place.

Tvaddic

You could twist that and say, how is Google making so much money on Apple’s ecosystem?

http://www.aichon.com/ Brad

Who said anything about Google? Google wins either way, and that’s fine. Android, meanwhile, is ahead only in market share, but in none of the other ways that matter.

Tvaddic

I don’t know how you can criticize Android, when they make some money in mobile. If Android was a company owned by anyone else, it would be doomed.

http://www.aichon.com/ Brad

Android makes money? For whom?

Android has been losing money for Google right from the start. Court documents in the Oracle v. Google case made that pretty clear a few months back, when they showed that Google’s Android division has suffered a net loss of millions of dollars every single quarter that it’s been available. That trend hasn’t changed.

Samsung is certainly profiting by building on top of Android, but that’s an untenable position if the foundation they are building on is unprofitable for the people supporting it. Google makes its money on advertising, and from the last set of numbers I remember hearing, they’re making more from iOS than they are from Android, despite iOS’ lower market share, hence why it’s trivial to suggest that iOS is killing Android.

Tvaddic

I wouldn’t fully trust that court case, because Google wants to show that Android is making as little money as possible, so they don’t want to pay a lot in damages. And if Google makes more advertising on iOS that’s a bonus, this way they can maximize mobile revenue.

http://www.aichon.com/ Brad

Google had a legal obligation to turn over those documents and an incentive for the platform to appear healthy to others, so I’d trust them. And if Google is making more money on a competing platform that has no costs for them, they have every reason to drop the one that is costing them millions while trying to displace a platform that is making them much more money.

Of course, they may have a valid fear that Apple will try to lock them out of iOS in some way (Apple already did it once, but then rescinded the ToS change that did it), so having more control over their destiny may be useful for that reason. I can understand that.

Tvaddic

One thing about the lawsuit, if you bought a song on Google Music via your Android device I imagine that would count, but what if you bought a song on your PC, then downloaded it to your phone, that isn’t Android revenue. But I’m glad Google is making Android, the competition between the big 2 drive innovation, and Google has shown they will waste money willing.

mikey

This is a big reason why Android won’t be a repeat of Microsoft vs Apple. M$ hurt Apple with services and software that were poorly support for Mac OS. Google can’t do this because most of that marketshare is sold to people who don’t use data, so they have to support iOS as the leader in actual use of tools. Google has to support iOS to get mobile eyeballs on their ads. Google’s biggest threat isn’t iOS, it’s company’s like Amazon who build on top of their investment in Android and cut them out of the ecosystem. In hindsight, I wonder if Google had thought long term, would the open Android have been a good idea. Carriers too are screwing the experience. They shit all over a golden opportunity to partner with Apple in early days and together own mobile the way Apple owned digital music with iPod. And perhaps the way Microsoft used to own the desktop. From a user perspective, Google services baked into Apple OS and Hardware is a much bigger win than iCloud or Google services bolted on. Billions of dollars spent fighting lawsuits instead spent on integrating, not just with each other, but with Windows making a ubiquitous mobile world would have been a huge user win. What might have been…

The Silver Fox

Excellent point about how Google actually needs iOS to drive their ad revenue, and that’s the reason Google develops top apps for iOS (eg Google Maps for iOS): because iOS users engage far more with their devices than Android users

http://www.thegraphicmac.com/ JimD

Here’s the truth: Android’s marketshare is made up of the same 40 or 50 tech bloggers who buy every fucking Android phone the minute they’re released. That’s like 750,000 phones per douchebag blogger each year.

Tvaddic

There are 1.3 Million android activations a day, I don’t think that’s the reason.

jimbotomy

Poe’s Law strikes again!

http://twitter.com/hprice Howard Price

This is so true and makes the idiotic comments from that halfwit Sculley early this week even more inane. What point market share if you can’t monitze it? At some point your share holders are going to sugest you invest in something profitable.